“The leads are bad”
is not a diagnosis

Background: Four Causes Set Before the Form

Lead quality is, to a large extent, a choice the firm makes. The first cause is the audience. Showing an ad to more people lowers the cost per lead, because it becomes easier to find someone willing to submit a form once selectivity is reduced, so leads become cheaper and less qualified at the same time. The second is the message: an ad promising something free attracts people who want something free, while an ad that states a price attracts people able to pay it. The third is the offer. A downloadable guide costs the reader nothing, a call costs half an hour and a willingness to be sold to, and the two produce different people. The fourth is the form itself. Each additional question reduces submissions and raises the quality of those retained, so a three-field form and a seven-field form are two different filters.

None of the four is a sales problem, and none is resolved by purchasing more leads.

The Metric That Conceals Them

Cost per lead is the easiest figure in marketing to improve, and it improves through precisely the choices above: broader targeting, a softer offer, and a shorter form. A cost per lead falling from $60 to $14 is reported as an improvement, yet nothing in that figure indicates whether any of the people who arrived can afford the product. If the audience was broadened to achieve the reduction, the firm is paying less for each lead and receiving a worse one, and both halves of that exchange appear on the dashboard as the same figure declining.

The question that resolves the matter is what a lead must do before it counts as qualified, and what one of those costs. If that definition was not written before the spending began, the figure cannot be produced afterward, and the dispute recurs each quarter.

Cause Five: Response Time

In some cases the sales team is responsible, though rarely in the way it is imagined.

• The Study: Researchers timed the first contact attempt on 1.25 million sales inquiries across 42 US companies.
• Seven Times Likelier: Firms attempting contact within the hour were nearly seven times likelier to reach the person and confirm a genuine prospect than firms waiting one hour longer, and more than 60 times likelier than firms waiting a full day.

A lead not contacted for two days is indistinguishable from a bad lead. It is a good lead left too long, and it is routinely filed as a quality problem because no other explanation is available to anyone involved.

Cause Six: Pre-Existing Demand

This cause is the least frequently checked, and it produces the most favorable reports while contributing the least. When eBay stopped bidding on its own brand name in 2012, 99.5 percent of those clicks returned free through the organic results beneath the ads. The same researchers found the ads were effective for new and infrequent users and nearly ineffective for frequent ones.

An account left to optimize on its own targets the people it already knows how to reach, because they cost least and convert most reliably. Their leads look excellent on a report. They are existing customers counted a second time on the way in.

A Diagnostic Framework

• Written Definition: Document what a lead must do to count as qualified, and date it before the next campaign runs.
• Three Weekly Measures: Against that definition, count how many leads arrive, how many are qualified, and how quickly the first reply is sent.
• Interpretation: Many arriving and few qualified indicates one of the first four causes. Many qualified and few conversations indicates the fifth. Many conversations and no contracts indicates none of the six, which is the finding most worth identifying early.

In Conclusion

“The leads are bad” describes a symptom with six possible causes and six different remedies. Without a written definition of qualification and three separately tracked measures, the complaint cannot be resolved and will recur on the same evidence each quarter. The productive response is a question: what specifically changes, who does it, and by when?